The Alphabet of Birds

by SJ Naudé

  After a few days he gets up. It is late afternoon. He opens the balcony doors. On the small balcony he does a few exercises. He is trying to find grace. He improvises his own clumsy pieces of choreography. There is sorrow in his bones. Slowly he starts displacing it through his movements on the balcony. Where the sorrow originates does not matter, he decides, just how one gets rid of it. But he knows he will keep gravitating towards the source. One cannot deny origins. Muscles, after all, start moving from the bone. He switches his phone on again, and an hour later Sam calls him to tell him about Butoh, about how it has taken over his body.

  The next day he unlocks the door and walks out without hesitation, breathing salty air into his lungs, the aromas of sea and fynbos. His strength has returned. He is hungry.

  He is back in Pretoria. Sam is so dedicated to his stage art that they hardly see each other. He gives Sam up to his movements, to the stage. Even though he is a student, Sam’s talents are such that he is in high demand in the trickle of stage productions that parade as public cultural life here. On the one occasion that he does see Sam, there are new stories. Sam tells of a period when he and his mother lived in a Hare Krishna temple, how he was molested there, how his mother was incapable of preventing it, how he then gained weight terribly as a young schoolboy, becoming almost immobile. During his teenage years there was a bulimic period, followed by a fanatical regime of fitness and diet. The narrative of all these manias is offered soberly, without self-pity. At some point, nevertheless, it all becomes too much. He has gained a new simplicity of physique and clarity of mind. He feels scorched clean, at odds with these difficult things of the body and the past. They become loosened from one another, he and Sam.

  Then he meets another young man, an accountant. Bert. He does not know where all this youthfulness surrounding him is coming from. He is not seeking it out. One might perhaps say that Bert is a little lacking in imagination, yes, but is that necessarily a disadvantage? Imagination, after all, requires so much energy. The accountant has a good sense of humour. He is steady. Their bodies fit, his and Bert’s. The man has a staggering erotic repertoire which does not accord with his image of Afrikaans decency. Outside the erotic sphere they are like marionettes. Neither of them challenge the puppet master, they are satisfied with the clumsy manner in which their bodies cut the air. They do not ask questions of the muscles, do not bend their bodies into question marks.

  He no longer sees Sam. At night, in the guest house, he circles endlessly around the bed in which the accountant is sleeping as if in a coma. Past the foot of the bed to the other bedside table and back. He has to touch his pillow each time before the next about-turn. A dumb zoo animal. He forces himself to stop, looks out of the window. The profiles of tropical plants are visible against the night sky. Now he knows. That’s what he is waiting for: for the body on the bed to start rattling so that he may hold it and contain the convulsions. But the sleeping one keeps snoring without stirring.

  In the midst of all his thoughts about bodily movements, his sister, who is going through a traumatic divorce, says, ‘It has become an integral part of me, the stress; it’s in my blood. I am constantly trembling and my fingers have become crooked and stiff.’

  On an impulse he says, ‘Come.’

  He and his sister get up from where they are having coffee in the guest house. While they walk, he calls Sam. Sam is not surprised to hear from him again, chatters as if nothing has happened. Full of light and goodwill.

  ‘I need your help,’ he says.

  ‘Of course,’ Sam says.

  They arrange to meet in a theatre on the dull campus. His sister, he tells Sam, was a ballerina in her young days. She started dancing on her toes too early, without their parents’ knowledge, when her feet were still soft and not fully formed. Then little bones in her feet shifted and ruined her ballet dreams. She had to stop dancing and even today, thirty years on, it hurts when she walks.

  That was perhaps the beginning of his sister’s withering, he thinks, when her feet were ruined. Long before her husband accelerated the shrivelling. Perhaps she reached the height of her joy and freedom when, as a child, she stretched upwards on her toes, in a heavenwards curve, like an unknown letter. He looks at her. She is slightly hunched, as if straining to get enough oxygen in her body. As if the bones have started to bend and shift everywhere.

  ‘So, here’s a substitute for you, someone with better instincts than mine.’ That is how he introduces his sister when they meet in front of the theatre. Everyone is smiling.

  Sam is standing behind her. They are on the stage. They do a few exercises to refresh her memory and to start forcing her skeleton back into position. He is sitting in the empty theatre, towards the back. Sam runs up the aisle to the technical control console, switches on the lights. Spotlights in pastel colours surround his sister. Sam switches on the music. For the first time in years, she starts to dance. Tentatively. Shadows of old movements starting to unwind the body’s memory. Then she stops.

  ‘I’m a bit lost,’ she says, ‘it’s too bare.’ She looks tiny on the stage.

  His sister, he thinks in the dark, has the kind of temperament that makes her vulnerable to the core. Love simply flows from her – without hindrance, dangerously. The man in whose web she has become trapped, whose claws have left such indelible marks, sensed it instantly. He sucked her dry and then started torturing her for the emptiness that remained.

  ‘We need a centre point,’ Sam says, ‘to make it less wild and empty.’

  Sam disappears behind the stage, brings out the spaghetti Jesus. Smoke also starts bubbling out, floating towards her. Sam emerges with a flamboyant jump.

  ‘Smoke to dance with!’ Sam says, and lifts her in his arms.

  They start dancing a pas de deux, their bare feet in the smoke. The choreography is being improvised. It centres around a delicate entanglement of arms and a rubbing of heads – her blondeness against Sam’s long hair, which has the colour and gloss of crude oil. Initially she is stiff, but gradually she relaxes (from the dark he looks at her ribs, on the verge of cutting through the skin). They sink to the floor with their buttocks and backs propped against each other. He starts recognising something of his sister in her movements again.

  At one point his sister performs a sequence that so upsets him he has to look away. She detaches herself from Sam. She keeps her feet in one place, and, straining and stretching, bends herself into such distorted self-embracing twists that she almost tears apart. She is trying to erase herself.

  Sam is behind his sister. He knows Sam cannot see him, the light is too bright for that, but Sam has enough experience to make his audience feel as if he is looking straight at them.

  When the music stops, her chest is heaving. For the first time in years, it looks as if something healing is flowing through her, as if she is starting to regain her original shape. She smiles at Sam for a while and he at her. She nods her head slowly, he nods his head slowly. Neither says anything.

  Through his sister’s resurrection, Sam touches his own heart again. It is a biological process, as in the dream: something is physically flowing through the dark, like a warm snake, settling like a dark and soft thing in his intestines.

  Now he is feeling torn between Sam and Bert. He tells each about the other, decides it is the decent thing to do.

  Sam shrugs his shoulders. ‘It’s cool.’

  No! he thinks. It is not cool. He wishes Sam were less of a hippy, were possessive and suffocating. Perhaps then he would be able to fall in love with him more swiftly. But perhaps the love would dissolve more swiftly too, then.

  He cannot let Sam go, he realises, he can only be in this place if it is with Sam. Sam who has nothing to do with his past here. He can only bear being in this city for so long as the strangeness that Sam is enabling him to feel endures. Sam makes it a different place, a nowhere place. While he is at Sam’s side (Sam with his restless limbs!), he can remove himself in his mind. He is both here and not here.
/>   He and Sam are sitting in a coffee shop, in the kind of artificial shopping-centre environment that passes for public space in this country. He takes Sam’s hand, forgetting for a moment where they are. It takes a while before he notices that people are staring. An echo of his militant younger self returns, when he would have snapped at the starers, but he just smirks, restrains himself. He just puts his other hand on Sam’s as well, shifting closer and hooking his ankles around Sam’s as if this could segue into a dance movement.

  When he takes his eyes off Sam’s, Bert is standing there, not far from their table, where he has perhaps been for some time. They look at each other, he and Bert. Bert looks at Sam. Bert turns around and walks away.

  It is Sam’s final performance, for the purposes of his studies. His exam. Sam has arranged a complimentary ticket for him. The audience consists largely of family members of the dance students. The performances last far too long, there are more amateurish efforts than one’s concentration can endure. During intermission, he sits alone in the cool air outside.

  Sam’s performance follows the intermission. It frightens him. It is the Butoh piece. When the stage lights are switched on, Sam is sitting in a chalk circle. There is nothing else on stage. Like something from modernist photography – an Edward Weston study of the body as abstraction. Sam’s head is bent forward, arms around the knees. Only his rounded back is facing the audience. A solid block. It fragments into a mosaic of muscles. He is moving from his core, minimally, only the individual muscles shifting and twisting. He moves very slowly, with utter control.

  He is naked, painted reddish-brown from head to toe. He writhes, wrenches himself away from the stage. A creature from the primordial slime. Caliban from The Tempest. He keeps low against the stage. As he struggles, the paint comes off; he is leaving behind a trail. His mouth is wide open, white teeth bared against the darkness.

  After the performance, Sam joins him on a little bench between the theatre and the carpark.

  ‘Notions of shame and the vulnerability of ideas about the self. That’s what I read into it,’ he tells Sam. ‘But I now realise: no, it’s about the more difficult stuff behind emotions.’

  Things that precede emotions, he thinks, for which there are no words. The body as a rock, making marks against a cave wall.

  Sam is inscrutable. He looks like an angel of dark glass.

  ‘It made me feel things that I didn’t know one was allowed to feel,’ is all that Sam has to say. And: ‘It’s the opposite of narrative.’

  He weaves his fingers through Sam’s curls, still damp after a shower (for rinsing off the paint). He does not know whether this thing with Sam is moving forward. It seems to be edging loosely sideways, crab-like. From one dance performance to the next. How does one push it into a direction? Perhaps the absence of direction is the idea. Loose shards, infinite performance. The carpark behind them empties out; they are left alone in the fumes. He leans over and kisses Sam on the lips. In silence, on the concrete bench.

  The crack of dawn. Near the guesthouse where he is staying, there is a fitness park where Sam wants to stretch, to jog, to engage his core muscles. They go there on the scooter. When they enter it, they are the only ones there, that is, other than the rough sleepers peering from underneath shrubs. Fog hovers in the lower parts. He knows this place from his youth, but now it is different. He feels uncomfortable, unsafe. Sam is not bothered, walking past the eyes in his loose-limbed way. They start jogging. Next to the running paths, there is apparatus for various kinds of exercise, screwed together with creosote poles and steel, now rusting and rotting. He just watches Sam when he stops for his stretching exercises, shakes his head when Sam tries to get him to join in.

  They run further. He looks at Sam. So dapper and compact. So full of goodwill, muscle power and New Age clarity. His teeth whiter than ever. When they turn a corner, they are forced to a halt by the scene in front of them. Two bloody feet at eye height. They look up. One can hear the jacaranda branch, from which the body is hanging, creak. Lightly, as the figure is swaying. A rope around the neck. Sam is speechless, starts trembling. He puts his hands around Sam’s shoulders. It is the man from his dream hanging there, he thinks, the Japanese dancer. He averts his eyes. When he looks up again, he sees his eyes have deceived him. It is a vagrant. The face is in the shadows. The grimy raincoat is hanging open, the body naked beneath it. How long he has been dead, he could not say. Did he hang himself? It does not look that way. And yet: perhaps he climbed the tree, put the noose around his neck and jumped. He is aware of Sam’s hair against his cheek. He holds his breath, waiting for the fit, but it does not come. He guides Sam away, his hand still around him. He does not look back. Does one still report a death here? Would the police be interested? Especially if it is a homeless person?

  For the first time in many years a memory from his youth returns. A day when he and a childhood friend came to jog and clamber over things in this place. Summer, late afternoon. A carefree place, then, where (white) children could run around barefoot and without fear at dusk. Once, after a run, they came out the gate, and found a man sitting there in his running outfit. On the bench to which they had locked their bicycles. Asleep. Oldish, about sixty. When unlocking his bike, he brushed against the man and felt that he was cold. He looked at the man’s lips, and then at his friend. The friend had already realised. Before he did. They kept looking at each other, got on their bicycles and sped away.

  He gets on the Vespa in front, Sam at the back. They drive slowly through the streets. They do not go to the police. Sam still has not said a word. Sam’s arms are tight around him, Sam’s cheek against his neck. Over his shoulder he looks back at the overgrown jogging park. He thinks Sam has read his father into the dark space, where the hanged man’s face should have been. Swallows dive through air over their heads, sweep along with them. The silver helmets click against each other when the scooter hits dips.

  It is strange, he thinks with the droning in his ears, to travel through this country. Full of impenetrable impressions. Sam is the only element of it he understands. But can he really read Sam? Whether he can or not, as they are driving, he starts loving Sam. With each pothole and bump it strengthens, the love, the intensity of it becoming almost unbearable.

  He drives them to Sam’s home (he has no idea how he will manage to get back). When they take off their helmets, he notices Sam is still distraught. He is trembling less, though. Sam takes a plastic tub from the fridge. He offers it. Blueish mushrooms. Shrooms. He takes one, then another. Sam takes three or four. They chew on the slightly rotten mushrooms in silence next to the humming fridge.

  They go out into the little garden, step onto the dead grass. They wait another twenty minutes until everything looks and sounds different: the colours deeper, the noise of the highway like a vast swarm of bees.

  ‘Hungry,’ says Sam.

  They go to a nearby place to eat. Sam is sitting behind him, giving instructions. The scooter ride feels like a trip through the clouds on a silver rocket. The wheels lift a few centimetres above the tar. He looks over his shoulder to see whether a red flame is spewing from the back. Like the rocket rides from his childhood. He remembers how he would grab hold of the steering wheel as if he could truly control the craft. His father would insert a coin. For a few seconds nothing happened. Then the machine started flickering and vibrating. The trip (or lack thereof) was always a disappointment, and over before you could blink an eye.

  The restaurant is in a shopping centre, right at the edge of the city, on an otherwise empty plain. Cars are gleaming in the sun on a tarred carpark surrounded by fields of grass and pylons.

  They are sitting in the cool restaurant against the back wall. Tiles on the floor, stainless-steel tables. Bright light. Sam is wearing a downy white jersey (angora? mohair?). It forms a kind of halo around him so that his body has no clear boundaries but frays at the edges. Behind Sam, there is surprising wallpaper. A paradisiacal landscape. In soft shades of yellow, orang
e and rusty brown, here and there some sky-blue mist. Everything flooded with celestial light emanating from an indeterminate source. As if the landscape is glowing from inside. Snowy peaks, cliffs, dizzying waterfalls.

  The waiter takes their order. He keeps looking at the wallpaper behind Sam: knotty trees growing from crevasses in the steep cliffs, hanging gardens, ferns disappearing into the spray, birds like bright flakes against the rushing water. On a rocky outcrop above the waterfall: an angel on his toes, wings stretched wide.

  He is feeling clear, filled with insights and the urgency to sharpen these insights.

  He focuses on Sam, forgets the landscape for a moment.

  ‘So, where is all this heading?’ It sounds blunt, the question, when he hears himself asking it.

  Sam stiffens, acts as if nothing has been said. It seems as if the landscape behind him darkens. Is there a tiny figure hanging above the watery turbulence? He focuses on it. The figure is actually moving, yes, swaying ever so slightly. He now also notices a ruin on the soft green grass above the abyss, bathed in the omnipresent light.

  The food arrives, but they instantly forget about it. Behind Sam, the water keeps falling and falling. Sam pours a glass of mineral water, then slowly empties it without putting it down.

  He repeats the question. Their knives and forks remain on the table. Blindingly clean.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Sam says. ‘Nowhere?’

  He looks out of the restaurant window. Some distance away, in the haze, the profile of the Voortrekker monument is vaguely discernible.

  He opens his mouth once or twice, closing it without saying anything. Then: ‘Nowhere? Over? Just like that, without warning? As suddenly as it started?’